The author is a poet, counsellor, and occasional scholar-in-residence. Musings on everything from advaita ("non-dualism") to sustainable living, interspersed with poems. Thanks to Zvi Jaspan of Kibbutz Tzora for the name for this blog.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Important questions

Who will come into power next, the democrats or the apricots?

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Why's it called a blow job when it's all about sucking?

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Can a heart of a Goy be transplanted next to the lungs of a Jew? Can a shiite liver coexist with a sunni kidney? These, my friends, are some of the questions that arise when considering the issue of transplants from an halachic perspective._______________________________________________

The big issue, the grinding suck the life out of your bones issue, at middle age, as an impractical dreamer who sold his soul to the devil mirage of creativity, is how to earn a living? And how to go on earning a living? And how to find a way of earning a living that does not opress and depress and crush with its internal contradictions and the impediments it seems to throw up to articulating a working self that is somehow connected to our deepest aspirations, our most permanent/burning/ themes?

And if such a thing, if a life enhancing way of earning a living does not exist, and those who have not dared or were not lucky or did not have the persistence or simply haven't been able to create money doing things that connect their inner and outer selves, where the available energy is not used to censor and crush the hidden and reveal the fabricated and constructed...if they have not done so by middle age, where children and mortgages and never ending bills play a muted tune of anxiety that runs under almost everything we do, then how to make one's piece with the stunted, arrested-process work situations we find ourselves in, how to trudge off day by day into situations of terminal compromise, anonymity and mediocrity??* Situations that seem to be so draining that what few sparks are left are soon submerged in the grey waters of numbing and senseless routine, of living from appearances, living from the outside in, living inauthentically...the sparks are submerged and the fear is that they will go out. Permanently. And that there is only death with no chance of birth or rebirth.

* [ Can this bleak portrait be reframed more honestly? more meaningfully? Less 'hopelessly'? ]

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The secret lives of teachers. Major X was having an affair with a woman who he wanted to impregnate. Mr Y had an entirely secret existence of junk food and recreational drugs. Public lives. Private addictions.

"Everyone's got to serve someone"

a "hogeh deyot" - Hebrew for someone who thinks a lot about things that are not directly related to the daily round. I worships two G?ds, that are probably one and the same - creativity and balance. Sat. Chit. Ananda. Gila Rina Ditza ve Chedva. Adoshem Hu Elokim. Veshal-om shanti shanti.